they don't love you like i love you

leo, Contributor, Lookie-Lookie

the Oxford dictionary defines to resist as 1. to withstand an action or an effect of, or more specifically: 1.1 to try to prevent by action or argument; 1.2 to refrain from doing (something tempting or unwise); 1.3 (no object) to struggle or fight back when attacked. In other words, to resist in English means to counterattack: to respond to a given state of things, may it be in the realm of physics, in regards to rhetorical matters or even when it comes down to desires. if this statement is valid, in terms of time, to resist locates itself in the after… that is, it consists of a reaction prompted only and exclusively as an effect from a set of occurrences. In a subject-object relationship for instance, this term would name a stage upon which an object is inflicted by a subject, yielding a response by the object that tries to rebuild the reality prior to the first strike. As such, resistance is usually viewed as a rebuilding, even though this might not be its most accurate definition.

It is said that some times… sometimes an electron accumulates so much energy that it launches itself in a movement. It goes out of its original orbit, leaps out and reenters the cycle: but then in a different position. For a long time I wondered if people could do something similar… Had I known better, I’d say we’ve been doing exactly the same. For centuries.

resistance is largely employed to categorize and describe movements opposing inequity derived from oppression. Although such usage can appear quite appealing in terms of politics, it is not only limited and naive, but inaccurate. The reason is simple: Oxford’s suggestion of to resist as a negative fails those who do so. For the resisting bodies, to resist does not mean to act after, but to strike first, to create, to invent, to organise, to disrupt, to destroy, to lie.

When I see my body reflected on the mirror, I do not see my body… I see the history of every single dark skinned person throughout the world, I see the herstory of blackness, otherness. I see bashed queer bodies lying on the corner of a street, I see the death of my lover through the glasses of a hospital, I see fear of touching my skin. I see my home being conquered and my grandmother captivated and forced into marriage with one of those who came. I see myself being taken somewhere, I become a no-land’s-man and I am refused by the very earth that gave me birth… besides that, I see people dying to have the right to vote, I see the first kiss a black man ever gave to another black man on a street; I see the tears of joy, when a child realised it could go anywhere. I see the struggle of being alive although we are not supposed to live

to resistis not, was not and never will be a re-action defined by and through negativity due to its roots in self-determination. And this is where, my dear, resistance reveals its most interesting, strong, and ambiguous face: if to resist distances itself from withstanding, if resistance goes beyond counterattacking oppression, these words leap outside of the positive-negative (acting-reacting) axis of meaning and encounter a verb, an action or a state that circumvents classification and remains a puzzle inside of philosophical discussions, to resist approximates itself from to be. I am suggesting here that, if for the male eurocentric body What does tobe mean? is the question to be asked in the direction of his ontological scope, to ask What does to resist mean? is, for an othered embodiment, to investigate her existence in the world and her ontological ramifications such as her being-in-the-world, her presence, her absence, her mental/spiritual foundations.

while seeing so much of it, I am rapidly thrown again towards the different trajectories an electron does around a proton and remember how it moves, sometimes, from one orbit to another. If there weren’t all these bodies, those brothers and sisters, would I be who I am? It is as if they were the very energy I accumulated… that, which came to life and became part of mine. When I call them, they always answer. They are all somewhere listening for their names

embodied negativities do notresist because they have nowhere to go or to protect a piece of land or to draw new lines of oppression… We resist as a mode of being-in-the-world, of being alive, owning and creating different timelines. We resist because we refuse to simply survive. We resist because we, in a different way from what was already conceptualised, are.

GREEN Jr, David B. “Out of This Confusion I Bring My Heart” - Love, Liberation, and the Rise of Black Lesbian and Gay Cultural Politics in Late Twentieth Century America. Diss. University of Michigan, 2015. Web 21 Jan 2017.